Support Engineer

Exa•San Francisco, CA

2d•$115,000 - $225,000•Onsite

About The Position

Support Engineers ensure committed Exa customers get their problems solved quickly, around the clock. Exa runs support AI-first: AI tools and agents triage and resolve tickets where possible, while Support Engineers handle the difficult, ambiguous technical issues that require an engineer. The role involves technical investigation across Exa’s API, SDKs, and customer integrations, reproducing bugs, and opening pull requests for Engineering to review. When an issue requires Engineering, the Support Engineer provides the context needed to act and remains the customer’s point of contact until resolution. This is an engineering role focused on owning fixes, not following scripts. The Support Engineer also builds and improves the support function, including ticket and SLA tracking, automations, documentation, knowledge-base content, and AI workflows. The role participates in a 24/7 follow-the-sun support model, coordinating shift handoffs and working with account teams to monitor customer health, manage escalations, and identify product feedback and potential fixes. Exa is building a search engine for the AI era. Its Search API powers agents, Fortune 500 companies, and AI labs. The company is largely based in San Francisco and has approximately 100 employees. This is an in-person opportunity in San Francisco.

Requirements

Several years of hands-on programming experience, including the ability to read and debug unfamiliar code and open pull requests in a production codebase.
Experience troubleshooting APIs, SDKs, or distributed systems in production; experience with search, retrieval, LLMs, or data pipelines is ideal.
A structured approach to ambiguous problems, including asking relevant questions, forming hypotheses, and testing them.
Sound judgment about when to continue investigating and when to escalate, and the ability to clearly explain technical problems to customers and engineers.
Comfort working AI-first and using AI tools and agents in daily workflows.
Availability for shift work as part of a 24/7, follow-the-sun support model.

Nice To Haves

Experience as a software engineer, support engineer, solutions engineer, or site reliability engineer at a developer-tools, API, or AI company.
Experience building with LLMs, RAG, or agents, and ability to reason about retrieval and search quality.
Experience building automations or AI workflows that reduce repetitive work for a team.
Enjoyment of investigating and resolving difficult, unclear problems.
Care about organizing the world's knowledge and making it accessible to machines.

Responsibilities

Configure the Pylon instance and build robust ticket tracking, SLA tracking, and automations to make support efficient.
Troubleshoot tickets that AI cannot resolve, including issues across the API, SDKs, and customer integrations.
Reproduce bugs and fix them by opening pull requests for Engineering to review.
Escalate issues to Engineering with reproduction steps, logs, customer impact, and details of what has already been ruled out.
Own customer follow-up for assigned tickets, including escalated tickets, until resolution.
Improve documentation, the knowledge base, and Pylon and agent workflows so more tickets can be resolved without human intervention.
Provide an automated, context-rich handoff of open tickets to the next Support Engineer at the end of each shift.
Keep Account Executives and Forward Deployed Engineers informed about tickets from their accounts and flag account-level risk early.
Monitor account health signals, raise contraction or churn risks to the account team and leadership with requested actions and owners, and follow through until resolved.
Identify patterns across tickets and turn them into product feedback and fixes.